TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE APPROACH TO SAVE THE VIDEO ECOSYSTEM

Paul Chaumont
Oct 15 · 6 min read

More than 300 hours being uploaded on YouTube every minute. The average US citizen having access to 4500 hours of daily live content through its TV provider, 50% more than 10 years ago. Facebook employing 4500 people to moderate video content and about to hire 3000 more. What do these figures have in common ? The ever-growing uncontrollable nature of video production on the internet and the tremendous waste and cost it will represent in a near future.


POINTLESS, IRRELEVANT AND UNPREDICTABLE

The evolution of a cloud-based ecosystem and access to costless video production tools have left us thinking that all video production uploaded, stored and played day after day were intangible assets with a zero cost. Huge mistake. Video has become the standard of the media industry, but the outcomes of such infinite production have not been taken seriously. Should and will our salvation require a sustainable video production ecosystem ?

The truth is media companies still do not really know what to do with video content they owned, own and will own :

· Past content is pointless without any real reuse strategy : imagine a giant library where you dump millions of books every day, with no real label and convince yourself that you will have complete ability to dig into it 2 days, weeks or months later. Thank you, AWS and its huge storage capacities : media industries now store trillions of video content they will never reuse.

· Present content is irrelevant the minute it’s online. Once it’s published, video content is already expired. At least we think this way because publishers and media owners lose almost immediately track of the life and death of a content on the internet. To the best, they keep score of views on their own platform and move to the homepage video a few hours later.

· Future content is unpredictable : it requires too much human resources to moderate upfront and by the time you know what to do with it and if it’s safe for work, you already have lost your launch window.

How to sum-up video production on the internet in a few words: don’t know what, don’t know where, don’t know when. However, the costs linked to such unmanageable strategy are tremendous.


LOSS OF PROFITS AND EXTRA COSTS

Video content accumulation for any media industry represents both loss of profits and additional costs. The loss of profit is linked to the short timeframe available to capitalize on a video Vs the number of videos to process. There used to be a time when a single video content had all your attention to make sure you would target it properly, make sure its content is safe, contact the right ad partners to bid on it and think about the platforms you’d push it on. Multiplying the operation to the infinite day after day has making it impossible to operate quantitative AND qualitative campaigns. Automation started to penetrate all levels of the content distribution process, except one part : assessing properly what was in each video, de facto reducing the value of each video, due to bad targeting, unsafe environments or irrelevant advertising.

In the meantime, extra costs went through the roof : human moderation by the thousands, increasing storage capabilities and time-limited content became the standard. Less profit, more cost and no concrete solution to lean towards a more sustainable model. Looking closer, the video content industry is pretty much looking like a dump running out of ideas to contain the new waste waves about to come.

Metaphorically, your video DB might look like this in a near future

THE CLIMATE CHANGE METAPHORE

If we do look at produced, published and stored videos like waste, which they are considering the environmental footprint of their data centers, you might face three different scenarios within the years to come, depending on how serious you consider the question :

The climate sceptics approach

No real care for the extra costs to come, as long as it makes money now. You keep storing for nothing, keep pushing the industrialized way with the help of an army of human resources for moderation. You bet that when time comes, you’ll find other solutions. At Reminiz, we do think you’re already doomed.

The local reasoned approach

Produce less but better, giving the favor to push and store “local” content, that has a real value, that you know of. Mass storage is out of the map and most importantly, each content is judged by its intrinsic value. This approach is probably as beautiful as unrealistic: how would you contain a media that already represents 80% of the internet traffic ?

The sustainable approach

Well, no surprise, this is our favorite. Acknowledging that video has now become a central media and will even more so established itself as the unique medium for most people does not mean we can’t do anything about the actual downsides of it.

What would be a sustainable approach of video content then ? For once, it would mean learning how to “recycle” existing content into new ones by mixing and matching bits and parts of them, through “snackable” content. One would not consider a video as a single entity anymore, only valid during a limited period of time but as a combination of timestamped parts available from your library and easy to replace in another content whenever needed. True reuse.

For twice, it would mean completely automating video moderation to reduce cost related to pre-publishing and then to storage. Produce once to publish multiple times, publish only safe content, store only parts you will reuse.


A clean and tidy virtual library, but less scary than in the matrix

IT ALL STARTS WITH UNDERSTANDING

Nothing sustainable can be achieved without true understanding of content. How would you want to recycle material if you don’t know its components ? This is why Reminiz grew as a company to address all kinds of video understanding and became an expert at facial recognition, logos and brand identification, settings, emotions, and objects detection, making certified assumptions on all kinds of interactions between various elements of a scene, from a gentle kiss to a ship sinking.

This detailed approach of video understanding enables infinite new possibilities to create sustainable video strategies and operate directly on :

· Your brand safety strategy : Set-up filters to make sure unsafe content is identified and blocked, whether on objective criteria (explicit content, violence, drugs etc.) or on personalized requirements.

· Contextual advertising : Create profiled video inventories fully aligned with your advertising strategies for a contextual approach and an increased likability. Make sure your ad appears on the right videos at the right time.

· Live Stream Monitoring : Monitor streams, channels and any content in real-time and increase live interaction with viewers depending on content and context of appearance.

· Content recommendation at scale : Automate large video volumes processing, replace human-based tags by verified and homogeneous tags at scale with minimum delay to improve instantaneous and continuous content recommendation to users.

In the end, it all comes down to the ROI you’ll generate for each video you’ll take the decision to host, push or even produce. Through this well-thought model and with the right tools, the return on investment can significantly grow, whereas keeping the “polluter’s strategy” will only increase the cost and lower the value.

The video industry is at a crossroad and only visionaries adopting a sustainable strategy, from production to storage, will manage to survive the tremendous costs of their ever-growing content libraries.

Reminiz Insights

Reminiz is a world pioneer video understanding technology offering real-time facial and logo recognition. Augmented Content for a never-seen viewer experience.

Paul Chaumont

Written by

Product Manager at Reminiz

Reminiz Insights

Reminiz is a world pioneer video understanding technology offering real-time facial and logo recognition. Augmented Content for a never-seen viewer experience.

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